Alison Bechdel Misses Feeling Special

You’ve been very well known for a long time among lesbians for your comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Now a musical adaptation of your graphic novel-memoir “Fun Home” just opened on Broadway, and last year you won a MacArthur “genius” grant. How does it feel to become suddenly mainstream? I’m so glad it didn’t happen when I was younger, because then it would have been all downhill.

You write a lot on your anxiety about not being successful and your envy of those who are. Do you find your anxiety receding with achieving fame? Yes, but it’s sort of a shortcut. I haven’t actually learned to deal with envy, because I’ve had this great fortune, getting a lot of recognition and outward manifestations of success.

Are you recognized on the street? Yes, increasingly, partly because I draw myself in my work, so I’m readily identifiable.

Your mother was an actress who gave up her career to raise your family, something you detail in “Fun Home.” She died shortly before the musical premiered. Did she get to see any of it? She didn’t. I gave her the script and the soundtrack, on a CD. I don’t know if she ever read it or listened to the music. She said, “I will be interested to see the reviews.”

Was she ambivalent about your success? She was. I was revealing intimate stuff about her life. But that was how I communicated with her. There was no other way to talk to her except by writing a book.

In one of your books, you publish part of a rejection letter you received from the poet Adrienne Rich. You had submitted a personal essay to a literary journal she was editing. Was she right to reject it? Yes. The essay was very self-indulgent and solipsistic. It was about the time my mother stopped kissing me good night when I was 7. That she had actually gone to the trouble of responding to it was almost more encouraging than not.

You draft most of your comics on your computer now. Has technology changed the creative side of your work at all? Google Image Search has been an amazing thing for what I do. My work has become more realistic, because it’s incredibly easy to get pictures of anything in the universe on Google. I’m a method cartoonist; it helps me to see actual things.

In “Fun Home,” you wrote about becoming a connoisseur of masculinity at a young age. Today a young person like you would be more likely to identify as transgender than gay. Is the butch lesbian endangered? I think the way I first understood my lesbianism, before I had more of a political awareness of it, was like: Oh, I’m a man trapped in a female body. I would’ve just gone down that road if it had been there. But I’m so glad it wasn’t, because I really like being this kind of unusual woman. I like making this new space in the world.

Among lesbians of a certain generation, there’s an ambivalence about the emergence of the transgender identity. I’m not totally tapped into that world, but I feel like people are more open to the genderqueer identity — they’re trans, but they’re not necessarily having surgery. There’s less of this binary pull, I think.

Do you think something is being lost now that queer culture is becoming more mainstream? Are gay people like everybody else now? We are. And there is a sadness in that. I wanted to think we were special, more highly evolved somehow. I really believed that in my youth. Obviously that’s ridiculous — we’re the same as everyone else, and it’s amazing that that is being acknowledged. But I feel wistful for the sense of being special. When gay people were rejected, there was this camaraderie and this sense of community that I don’t feel anymore. I miss that. But I wouldn’t want to go back politically.

How cool would it have been to be an Eisenhower-era butch? It would have been awful.

Interview has been condensed and edited.

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